RogueWarrior said:
Thus by this definition, child birth is not a miracle.
It is easily explained: Penis goes in. Penis goes out. Penis goes in.... This goes on for about 30 seconds. Semen comes out. Sperm finds egg. Sperm fertilizes egg.
Happens likely 100s of thousands times a day throughout the animal kingdom.
I'm curious which natural law or laws actually explain, fully, the suite of phenomena surrounding childbirth. I'm especially interested in how a person--that is, a being with phenomenal consciousness and a personal horizon--is formed thereby. Presumably, a full explanation would start with ontologically fundamental units plus applicable laws (which would themselves be explained--somehow, and good luck with that--by the fundamental units) and proceed in a step-wise and gap-less manner all the way up to persons.
Of course, I wouldn't expect you to actually write out such an explanation, but could you at least gesture at one? I have to say, I am rather skeptical that you could do so, for a couple of reasons.
First, we've never found a physical fundamental unit that I've ever heard of. String theory posits what might be fundamentals if they exist--but not only might they not exist, they might also not be fundamental. A fundamental is something about which we can ask no further questions. So, for example, when atoms were first discovered, we thought for a time we'd found the fundamental. Thus the name, "atom." But very quickly someone asked "so, what are atoms made of?" and the illusion was blown. If we find the fundamental unit, such a question will be obvious nonsense. Of course, we've never found anything with that feature in the physical world. Any adequate explanation would have to start with such a fundamental.
Second, there's the troubling question of how to ground the existence of natural laws. If your explanation involves natural law, natural laws themselves have to be explained before your explanation works, no? Otherwise, there are still grounds for asking further questions--perhaps natural laws are themselves miraculous. They seem suspiciously so to me: what natural law could explain the existence of natural laws? Isn't that what a miracle is: just something that exists but isn't explainable by natural law? And then, if any explanation relies on miracles worked right into the fabric of the explanation, how have we avoided miracles?
If you can't actually, then by virtue of features of your own position, it seems that JP
might have a point. Of course, perhaps
ultimately, it'll turn out that no miracles occur. But in the absence of the kind of explanation I've called-for, there are no grounds for ruling them out.
RogueWarrior said:
It is not miraculous at all except through personal incredulity.
This reference to "personal incredulity" has always puzzled me. You're not the first person to use that phrase, though I cannot recall at the moment who actually coined it. But whenever someone does, it sounds suspiciously like he or she is insisting that we shouldn't be asking any further questions, because doing so is somehow illegitimate. Incredulity, as I understand it, abides while questions taken to be substantive on the part of an epistemic agent also abide. That is, if you offer some explanation X which consists of steps a,b, and c, and I see gaps in those steps which I question with inquiries y and z, if X is truly an explanation, you ought to be able to answer y and z, in however many iterations it takes. If you cannot do that, then I have a right to my incredulity, and it's surely foolish to suggest otherwise.
